by Tom Law
Tom Law
Unlike most previous day after Thanksgivings, I entered into the Black Friday sales melee and escaped without bodily injury, but did sustain a devastating blow to my ego.
Normally, the day after for me is consumed with yard work, erecting seasonal light displays and college football - plenty enough of all three to keep me occupied if the weather is cooperative.
I have disdained, for the most part, standing in line for a store to open at 12:01 a.m. or even 5 a.m., to be among the first to purchase a variety of doorbuster items.
The lone exception for me was Home Depot featured a sale one year on prelighted Christmas trees that Karen wanted badly.
So there we were one Friday after Thanksgiving, standing out in the cold at 5 a.m., waiting with about a hundred other folks to bust the door down.
It was uneventful. We secured the tree. We went home. We ate breakfast and as soon as it became daylight, I began my usual day after chores.
Over the years, as I stayed out of harm’s way, I did provide long distance emotional support to younger members of the family ensnared in retail and forced to ride herd on the madding crowd in the early hours of Black Friday.
Case in point: My son recently emailed me an 11-year-old photo of his wife, Gracie, blockading the door at Best Buy at 5 a.m. one Black Friday.
Gracie isn’t bigger than a New York minute and the store leadership had put her at the door to open it and try to keep these revved up, highly caffeinated people in line?
The photo proved it was true. There was Gracie on one side of the door and a horde of grinning would-be purchasers of a number of items, some members of said horde so excited they had their faces pressed against the door glass and Gracie showing no fear.
It has been my practice to avoid such scenes, but Karen and I the day before Thanksgiving had spied some items on sale for Black Friday at one of our favorite commercial outlets, Tractor Supply.
Karen was tied up for an early morning Black Friday run so she boosted my positive energy and, armed with a Tractor Supply sales paper complete with circled items, threw me into the Black Friday fray.
I wasn’t overly gung-ho about the mission, but I was dressed and pulling into the Tractor Supply parking lot at 6:55 a.m. last Friday.
The weather was cool and damp having rained a dab in the overnight hours, but in no way hampering the manic, let’s buy everything on sale proceedings.
As I turned into the Tractor Supply parking lot, a bit of fear seized me as there was not a single vehicle parked in front of the store.
My foot instinctually hit the brake.
Then the questions began to run through my mind and the panic began to grow.
Have they canceled the sale?
Does the store open later than the 6 a.m. I thought I saw in the sales paper?
Is this the Friday after Thanksgiving?
Am I mentally okay?
My panic subsided when I noticed the store brightly aglow with lights and two store associates standing at the front door chatting as they surveyed the vacant parking area.
Fine, I decided, maybe everyone had flooded the store earlier in the morning and now was the post initial opening lull.
I parked and ventured toward the front door where I engaged the Tractor Supply employees – Candi Spencer and Kayla Smith – in conversation.
“So, have I already missed the Black Friday crowd or will it be a late arriving throng?,” I asked the two nice young women.
“What Black Friday crowd?,” one of the Tractor Supply girls said. “We haven’t seen hardly anybody yet.”
“I would have thought you would have been overrun with people since you had this advertising insert,” I said, brandishing my neatly folded and marked up sales paper.
“Oh, that,” the other employee said. “If you read on that paper there at the top, we’ve had this sale going on all week anyway so we’ve had a lot of people shopping with us the last five days but not so far this morning.”
How had I missed that little nugget of information?
And, more importantly, how did master collector of all sales information Karen Law miss something as important as a five-day sale that includes Black Friday?
As I continued to process this shocking development, I decided to undertake my shopping mission whereupon I encountered David – at least that’s what his name tag said – and through a question or two about the baseball cap I was wearing, launched into a thoroughly enjoyable discussion about college football and basketball.
David allowed as to how much he loves watching college football save for three teams: Auburn, Florida State and South Carolina.
“There’s just so many things a man will put up with,” he said. “And, I draw the line there with those three teams. I just can’t watch.”
(David also said his wife is a graduate and big football fan of Clemson. As I watched the final score of the Clemson-South Carolina game roll across the screen Saturday, I wondered how ol’ David was doing right then.)
We closed our conversation as David explained the five-game ticket package he had just purchased for Clemson basketball had included the home game against perennially ranked Duke and I picked out the pajama set Karen had circled on the sales paper.
Now that was my kind of Black Friday shopping experience. I was the only shopper in the store. The items I had put on my wish list were all available and I bought them while carrying on a conversation about college football. It just does not get any better than that, I decided. If this is the Black Friday of the future, then I’m all in.
Tom Law is the publisher of The Toccoa Record. Reach him at tlaw@thetoccoarecord.com.